Keliy Anderson-Staley, Helen, 2009

"-Americans" draws attention to the fact that images of ourselves exist within a history of images. Our identities are linked to the visual history of social difference, a history in which photography has not always played an innocent role. Like the photographers of the 1850s, I use hand-poured chemistry that I mix myself according to original recipes, period brass lenses, and wooden view cameras to expose positive images directly onto blackened aluminum and glass. The nineteenth-century collodion process was frequently used for "scientific" ethnographic studies of the human face, many of which were based in racist assumptions about physiognomy. In using this process, I aim to reexamine photography's central role in defining difference.Although the project evokes the visual language of nineteenth-century ethnography, it frustrates the categorizing impulse we often bring to images in a race-conscious society. Each image in this project presents a face and is titled simply with a first name. The title of the project, "-Americans," alludes to the hyphenated character of American identities (Irish-American, African-American, etc.), while only emphasizing the shared American identity. Therefore, although the heritage of each individual might be inferred from assumptions we make about features and costumes, the viewer is encouraged to suspend the kind of thinking that would traditionally assist in decoding these images in the context of American identity politics.A large part of my practice as a wet plate photographer includes the involvement of my subjects in the creation of the images that represent them. They choose their own clothing-whether an old T-shirt with a defining statement, an exposed chest with a tattoo or proudly-worn ethnic dress. The portrait is straightforward, and the sitter knows that it is for my project, that it will become part of a "collection" of images. I photograph them, blemishes and all (which the process readily reveals) and use no props, preventing the viewer from developing too much of a narrative context for each portrait. My ultimate goal is to present a vast collection of faces in all their variety, but without too much specificity, allowing the common human denominator to come to the foreground.